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chapter 3 into the Big League Although a Deep South City, we like to think that our horizons are broader, our tolerance greater, our hospitality more spontaneous than elsewhere. We are, we believe, a completely cosmopolitan city. We have no continuing history whatsoever of serious disturbances between our white and Negro peoples. —mayor victor h. schiro (1965) On the mild winter night of January 10, 1965, the Sugar Bowl stood empty, awaiting a torrent of fans for the American Football League (AFL) All-Star game, an exhibition that forty-year-old businessman David F. Dixon had lured to New Orleans to benefit the Police Foundation. More importantly, the city sought to reinforce its claim to the National Football League (NFL) that it had eliminated all racial barriers in its bid to land an expansion team. Dixon was among the new generation of leaders who sought to expand the city’s attractions. Across town, Clem Daniels, an exceptional black player for the Oakland Raiders, stood with some teammates outside Seymour Weiss’s Roosevelt Hotel, waiting for a taxi to the French Quarter. Although six cabs had lined up along University Place, which runs in front of the hotel, the drivers had all left their cars to avoid serving the black players. After much frustration, Daniels recalled, “Finally, we stood in the middle of the street and a cab stopped rather than run us down.”1 On Bourbon Street, Daniels and his friends were mocked, insulted, and turned away by bouncers except at Al Hirt’s and Pete Fountain’s jazz clubs, which extended a warm welcome to the All-Star players. Unlike the seedy striptease clubs that could rely on the steady patronage of locals, seamen, and men seeking escape from the sexually repressed Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana hinterlands, Hirt and Fountain sought to provide first-rate entertainment for more discriminating tourists. The African American players had an even more difficult time hailing a taxicab back to their hotel. Only one driver stopped, and he averred that he could not risk arrest for transporting the men several blocks through the heart of the city. The players ended up asking directions and walking back to the hotel. After hearing the complaints of the twenty-one affected black athletes, the AFL shifted the game to Houston.2 74 new orleans on parade For decades the Crescent City had painstakingly tended its image as a genteel, cosmopolitan city while clinging tenaciously to segregation. For many years white New Orleanians could afford to engage in racial proscription without worrying about the loss of tourist dollars. With its balmy climate, rich cultural heritage, celebrated hedonism, and flamboyant French Quarter, New Orleans could bank on a steady influx of tourists with only scant inducement. Because its tourist trade continued to cater primarily to white southerners, New Orleans easily clung to old ways. After the mid-1950s, when many white northerners began to question Jim Crow, it gradually became essential for cities to drop such practices in order to maintain a progressive image. Conventions and professional sports teams, increasingly coveted by cities seeking to enter the “big league,” could go wherever their leaders wished, and by the 1960s an increasing number of these leaders blacklisted cities that failed to integrate racially. Black activism and federal legislation ultimately delivered U.S. cities from Jim Crow. Historian Lizabeth Cohen has demonstrated that the ideology of what she dubs the “Consumers’ Republic” increasingly “bore the burden of making postwar America more egalitarian and democratic,” so much so that by the 1960s even southern whites “were getting a clear message that the consumer marketplace could not easily be preserved as segregated space.”3 In New Orleans, the desire to develop the tourist and convention trade and host professional football played a similarly important role. Once it became clear that segregation was hurting the city’s national image, white political and business leaders became more receptive to African American civil rights activists’ demands for equal access to places of consumption.4 Unfortunately, efforts to ameliorate racial proscription revealed the reactionary tone of local political discourse, rooting white New Orleans leaders more firmly in the soil of southern racial values than in that of the progressive changes. Concern over national image and the black struggle for equal access to public spaces, schools, and jobs, however, gradually forced Crescent City decision makers to rethink their allegiance to discrimination.5 Just as French Quarter preservationists learned to make economic arguments about the fragility of the tourist...

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